Overview
The Things of Life investigates the way we experience the ordinary everyday world around us. It explores the notion that what we see and feel is informed by association, memory, mood and much else, so that our waking lives often resemble a collage of sensations, a series of flashbacks and connections. Moments of extreme drama can trigger these off (the show takes its title from Claude Sautet's film Les Choses de la Vie in which the key moments in a man's life flash before him as his car crashes). More usually they come to mind unbidden, seemingly from nowhere. The artists in this show use different strategies to illustrate this mysterious process. Some use found objects, junk or recycled material as a metaphor for the way the nondescript and marginal can suddenly assume significance. Others use art historical reference and appropriation to illustrate the idea that the cultural artefacts to which we are exposed modify our experience of actual life. Humour is evident in the show, as is that sense of dislocation, which is at the very heart of the way in which memory and association work.
The Things of Life is curated by Pascal Rousson. Rousson is a graduate of L'ecole nationale des beaux-arts de Lyon and L'ecole superieure des beaux-arts, Geneva. Solo exhibitions include: Very Ape, Vegas Gallery, London (2011); Vegas Peep Show, Amsterdam (2010); House of Pain, Vegas Gallery, London (2008); In-Vitro, Geneva (1998); Loco Citato, Liege (1995). Pascal Rousson lives and works in London and is represented by Vegas London.
